quote:If you're a white guy in prison, it doesn't make a bit of difference to what conditions are in Whitehole Texas.

That's exactly my point here. IF you're a white person in one place in the US, then the treatment of white people somewhere else has little bearing on you. That's not true if you're any other minority- for minorities, their treatment in one place suggests what their treatment in other places will be, which is why acts against them have to be investigated also as acts against the class they belong to for the purposes of identifying racism or hate crimes that may be at play.

Can you unscramble that for me? I could try to guess at what you meant and how you got there based on your past utterances, but let's give you the benefit of the doubt and let you restate, hopefully in the direction of NOT saying that beating up poor white kids and raping White Convicts constitutes some form of affirmative action. Do you or do you not concede that the focus on national oppression of "minorities" inspires oppression of whites where whites are the disempowered minority, such as prison?

If you're a white person in one place in the US, then the treatment of white people somewhere else has little bearing on you.

That's the core point. Spend more energy reading what I write and less on coming up with things you want me to be saying and then trying to shoehorn that meaning into what I actually said and you might be much less confused here, like so:

quote:hopefully in the direction of NOT saying that beating up poor white kids and raping White Convicts constitutes some form of affirmative action.

Since that doesn't even begin to resemble anything I said, you should refrain from making crap like that up and pretending that it has any relevance to the conversation.

The acceptability of the way that people are treated in any particular place has no relevance to whether or not that treatment is localized or generalized.

People being harassed and physically assaulted is unacceptable anywhere. But white people being treated poorly in prisons does not sens a message to white people not in prison that they risk being similarly mistreated wherever they go.

Is it prejudicial? Certainly. But it doesn't generalize. Sitting here in my office, I have the privilege of not needing to worry that I will similarly be subject to such violence on my way home from work on account of race, because I am part of the majorian group in that sense.

It's a bad situation in its own regard, but it is not oppressive to white people in the US as a whole.

People who are not white, not part of the majorian group, do not enjoy that advantage, particularly when white people, as the majorian group, are acting against them. They do have to live in a world where the racial balance is against them, and thus continually have the power for their prejudices to dictate what is seen as the societal norm. (This is also why it is perfectly possible for minorities to be racists- specifically to perpetuate oppressive racial prejudices of the majority against themselves, assisting in perpetuating their own oppression)

Please stop with this exceptionally spurious attempt to equate "not racist/not a hate crime" and, effectively "perfectly fine". There is plenty of room to identify wrong and unjust treatment without co-opting systems of persecution that don't actually apply to you. All that comes of doing so is further marginalizing and trivializing the kinds of persecution that people who are actually facing them experience. Instead, try to imagine, for those small experiences with prejudice, what your world would be like if you had to face them everywhere you went, every day of your life, on a constant basis, and appreciate the fact that the tools that you have at your disposal to deal with those directed instances of prejudice are, because of societal prejudices, often denied to those in the minority.

quote:tipping my hat to DJQ, both the sheetheads and the Nazis see themselves as victims, and justify their atrocities as some sort of grisly social justice. Or at least excusing it, as Italian KFOR troops in Kosovo did when they stood by and let Albanian mobs murder and pillage Serbian elderly in a nursing home.

Not to mention you trying to do it here an now in this conversation as you try to insist that you, as part of the empowered majority are being subject to societal racial persecution instead of flares of localized racial prejudice that your race does nothing to prevent you from escaping. (And that actively grow out of pervasive oppression of those that are lashing out.)

You have legitimate places where you can claim that you have to deal with societal injustice, especially in the form of classism from being at the bottom end of the economic ladder; you don't need to claim generalized persecution based on factors that you don't actually suffer societal oppression from.
Posts: 11997 | Registered: Oct 2005
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Trouble is that you and Eric Holder are pissing on the law of the land when you redefine hate crime invidiously. The actual crime was set out in law to be race neutral. Invidious Selective enforcement of laws that were promised to protect everyone (whites, straights, males and christians included) have been hijacked to fit your pet theory and the result is more racial hate crimes and unrest that we'd seen since the 1990s. racial Selectivity in law enforcement is not just prejusice, but unconstitutional corruption. .

I supported the passage of hate crime laws because i believed they would be enforced a. Written.

I dont clain "generalized persecution." I AM claiming classist bigotry here. I am saying that because of gated-community smug white theorists, poor whites in the inner city have no recourse. I know very well that the true enemy of poor city whites and whites in prison isn't their minority neighbors, but the smug privileged whites who enable affirmative atrocity against them to assuage their white guilt.

Your racist doublespeak is nothing more than a tool to keep the poor divided by skin color. MLK once said that rich white men keep power by feeding poor white men the vicious lie of white supremacy. Today the rich white men tell that Vicious lie to poor blacks, encouraging to take out their frustrations on the whites in their reach... Certainly not the rich protected privileged whites.

Damn right it's about clqass. Your uneven illegal and unconstitutional df of hate crime is, at the end of the day, all about preseving the status quo.

it annoys be that you are construing what i am saying as some sort of denial of institutionalized racism. i even support affirmative action in some hiring. what I object to is the institutional wink and nod that you give to hate crimes that so clearly have the same ultimate effect as institutionalized racism, ie. RACIAL SEGREGATION. It's not a good thing for African Americans for whites to be given a valid reason to fear their kids going to school with black kids. Unequal laws and relative impunity for racially motivated violence will do more damage to black educational opportunitiethan anything Reagan did.
Posts: 44193 | Registered: Jun 2001
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Indeed, which is why I advocate that it be evaluated based on effect on people as a class, and not corrupted to simply be about race as you attempt to do here.

Nice try, but no biscuit.

quote: I am saying that because of gated-community smug white theorists, poor whites in the inner city have no recourse.

Which is pure nonsense. They lack recourse _because they're poor_. And, on a wide scale, because powerful, wealth based interests have played on racism to cut support for people that are poor and encourage urban flight of the more well-off in no small part by playing on racist associations of blacks with poverty to weaken and undermine such programs.

quote: MLK once said that rich white men keep power by feeding poor white men the vicious lie of white supremacy. Today the rich white men tell that Vicious lie to poor blacks, encouraging to take out their frustrations on the whites in their reach.

MLK was spot on and you're exemplifying what he was talking about here, even to the point of pretending that people somehow need to be told to react violently to being oppressed. You're putting the cart before the horse- blaming the people explaining _why_ there is violence for causing the violence, which is completely absurd. The violence would be there regardless as a natural product of oppression and poverty. The people you're blaming are only guilty of being honest about its causes and trying to build a roadmap out of the situation. Instead of taking on the wealthy interests that are actually perpetuating the problem, you're attacking the academics that are pointing to the ways to push back against the damage they're doing. (Nevermind the bias implicit in your association of relevant academics with white people)

quote: what I object to is the institutional wink and nod that you give to hate crimes that so clearly have the same ultimate effect as institutionalized racism, ie. RACIAL SEGREGATION.

Just the opposite- just crimes are the _reuslt_ of segregation. They feed back into it certainly, but you're blaming the victim here instead of honestly following the chain of events to its root. Playing up the violence, instead of trying to understand where it's coming from and address those concerns is active promotion of both racism and classism that makes the problem worse. The kids in that school didn't choose to be segregated there. That was done to them, and violence is cropping up as a result of that and similar actions that push them down.

quote:It's not a good thing for African Americans for whites to be given a valid reason to fear their kids going to school with black kids

And yet we keep acting, similar to yo, in ways that create places where they have to fear that instead of unwinding the damage and removing the threat. You'd have use implement something akin to entrapment, where we apply oppressive pressure that provokes violence, and then punish people double for breaking under it and reacting with violence (not just for the crime itself, but for the bogus assertion that it causes white people as a whole to fear similar acts within their own communities) which applies even more oppressive pressure.

That doesn't mean that individual cases should be given a free pass of any sort, but trying to cast the oppressed as oppressors as you'd have us to by punishing them for oppression on top of those crimes is an active tool of oppression. You are actively speaking here from the status quo that is causing the situation to feed back into itself and get continually worse.